A hybrid training method with probabilistic adaptive strategy for feedforward artificial neural network was proposed and applied to the problem of multi faults diagnosis of rolling bearing. The traditional training method such as LM shows fast convergence speed, but it’s easy to fall into local minimum. The heuristic method such as DE shows good global continuous optimization ability, but its convergence speed is slow. A hybrid training method of LM and DE is presented, and it overcomes the defects by using the advantages of each other. Probabilistic adaptive strategy which could save the time in some situation is adopted. Finally, this method is applied to the problem of rolling bearing faults diagnosis, and compares to other methods. The results show that, high correct classification rate were achieved by LM, and hybrid training methods still continued to converge while traditional method such as LM stopped the convergence. The probabilistic adaptive strategy strengthened the convergence ability of hybrid method in the latter progress, and achieved higher correct rate
